Saturday, January 3, 2015

If You Still Have Money Left Over From the Holidays....

The Daniel F. Kelleher Auction Sale #662 (January 23-24, 2015) features more tantalizing country and area collections than I've encountered in awhile. (There is one Blue collection, lot 857, that looks interesting but one would need to see this in person to gauge its completeness. If you look at lot 857, note what I assume are custom binders. Cool.) But I'm posting about this sale because of the range of single country and area collections, particularly Tony Pasquarello's "Impossibles" Collections.

According to the auction firm, these are "vast country collections from 1840 to 1940 where the emphasis was on obtaining stamps that were impossible to find and to complete each collection. (I'm not certain that "Impossibles" is entirely accurate, but at least they didn't called it the "Uniques" collection.) Pasquarello's collections focused primarily on Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt (see the image on the left), Estonia, Finland, France, Germany & Germany States, Greece, Hungary, Iran, Italy and Italian States & Colonies, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Colonies, Norway, Poland, Portuguese Colonies, Romania, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Tripolitania, Turkey and [the always popular] worldwide balances. The collections are mint and used and complete or almost 99% complete." Not only do I like the date range that Mr. Pasquarello chose, but also that there are a surprising number of (choice) used stamps as opposed to the high percentage of unused/mint typically found in large country collections. Now all I have to do is win each of these lots and I will be well on the way to a nice Brown International Collection (or a Blue with a lot of extra pages).

In addition to Pasquarello's holdings, there are many others worth perusing, not the least of which is Michael Roger's specialized Ethiopia. But the latter falls beyond the scope even of the Brown Internationals.